Chapter 5. Enacting the international: R. G. Watt and the League of Nations Union

As Julie Evans, Margaret Allen and Cindy McCreery have argued in this section of Transnational Ties, concepts of empire provided powerful ways of mediating the ‘authority’ of trans-colonial governance, images of gender and competing identities for Australians in the nineteenth century. Moving into the twentieth century, however, and with the accelerating pressures of mobility, communication and consumption—in short, of modernity—empire became a less exclusive way of experiencing the authority of Australia’s transnational ties. Akira Iriye has noted the extent to which an idea of international society came to define forms of conduct, activism, intervention and accountability early in the twentieth century. These forms in turn seemed—so H. G. Wells observed—to summon ‘a new kind of people’, a ‘floating population’ of figures associated with an increasingly formalised sector of international organisations.^[1] The authority these figures invoked in their ideals, and exercised in setting ‘standards’ and ‘processes’, continues to underpin much of the discursive power of the ‘international’ and the experience of transnationalism.

Just as ‘empire’ had particular meanings for Australia as a sequence of settler colonies, so did the ‘international’ as a space associated with new civic modes framed by concepts of nationhood and state experimentation. A good deal has been written about ‘international citizenship’ as it informed essentially voluntary social movements associated with labour and women’s rights from the late nineteenth century onwards, and comprehending issues of destiny and solidarity. The transition into more institutionalised, and later professionalised, forms of action is less studied—except as a loss of that earlier vitality, or as a break between distinct identities and experiences.^[2] After World War I and the recognition of Australia at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (explicitly) and the Russian Revolution (implicitly), these new modes of the international—as an ideal of world regulation or global (potentially violent) transformation—required development and recognition.

For some commentators, these modes served to defuse the challenge of a type of nationalism with no goal beyond its own insular, radical tendencies.^[3] These modes were also seen to demonstrate political ‘maturity’. In acquiring ‘special dominion’ responsibilities at Paris, so Harrison Moore argued in 1933, Australia remained within the compass of the British Empire but with enhanced capacities for independent state action. Such capacities, John Latham added, also recast the wider sphere in which civil society must be imagined. By entering into the conduct of ‘international relations’, Latham stated, Australians must accept that, ‘in any intelligible sense’, the main currents of society can exist only ‘between men organised in States and not between unorganised masses of men, or between any State and such a mass’.^[4] Less defensively, W. K. Hancock observed that the British Empire itself had proven more a laboratory for, than simply a precursor to, the recognition of the kind of ‘international problems’—especially of economic, cultural and racial diversity—that so characterised the twentieth century.^[5]

Translating such thinking into reality, while also fleshing it out as imaginary, was a rather different matter, and one that still—through the inter-war years—required self-conscious adaptation. A figure such as Jessie Street might negotiate such a transition fairly seamlessly. Her privileged family background (with a fair degree of ‘empire’ providing structure and opportunity) was a considerable, largely unquestioned asset, and brought an element of continuity to campaigns that were underpinned by extensive travel and spanned from prewar feminism and peace and disarmament to post-1945 concepts of human rights.^[6] For others, however, this was much less the case. To become the ‘new kind of person’ Wells identified was an experimental and perhaps risky affair. Frank Moorhouse has conveyed much of this process in the figure of Edith Campbell Berry, the heroine of his novels Grand Days and Dark Palace. Leaving Sydney to take up her position as clerk, Internal Administration, Division 1, Class B, in the League of Nations, Berry soon finds herself in a Geneva café, ‘testing herself to see if she indeed felt international’. Did she move or behave like a stranger or tourist? Was there some distinction in comportment between being an ‘international woman’, a ‘European’ or a ‘cosmopolitan’, and how might such a persona be accessible to an Australian, accustomed only to the ‘brand new’?^[7]

I want to look now at one such process of experimentation, noting what was invested in it as a transition between the worlds of ‘empire’ and ‘international’ with which we are much more familiar, and particularly by registering the risks involved. ‘Missing links’ are not always edifying creatures, but they do help us understand as historically conditioned much that we otherwise take for granted. At a time when the ‘international’ is invoked so potently—as threat, benchmark or the selective domain of intervention by ‘the willing’—it is particularly useful to look back at how that space first came to be ‘peopled’.